The Role of Irony in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments

Recent authors have suggested that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings are fundamentally ironical, and that it is mistaken to see them as containing philosophical and theological claims. Rather, the point of these writings is to show that the really important theological and philosophical truths cannot be expressed. I argue that such interpreters are correct to see pervasive irony in Kierkegaard’s writings, but wrong about how this irony works from a literary perspective. Philosophical Fragments is analyzed as a test case to see how Kierkegaard uses irony, and to show that this use of irony is consistent with the advancement of substantive philosophical and theological claims. Many authors, beginning with Kierkegaard himself, have seen the writings attributed by Kierkegaard to the Johannes Climacus pseudonym as having a central place in the Kierkegaardian authorship. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author Kierkegaard says that Concluding Unscientific Postscript is “the turning point in the whole authorship.”1 To signal its special place in the authorship, as a book that is, strictly speaking, neither esthetic nor religious, Kierkegaard says that it had to be attributed to a pseudonym, “although I did place my name as editor, which I have not done with any purely esthetic production – a hint, at least for someone who is concerned with or has a sense for such things.”2 Of course, Postscript is a postscript to Philosophical Fragments, albeit a rather long-winded one, and since Kierkegaard had already placed his name on that earlier volume as “editor,” we are probably safe in assuming that the same kind of “hint” is being offered in the case of Fragments as with Postscript. 1 SFV, SV1 XIII, 542. 2 SFV, SV1 XIII, 523.